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She’s only ten years old, but she knows something is wrong with her father. Her mother says he just needs time to rest, to clear his mind. They must never question him. They must never call the police.

This week, by the way, is a special occasion: it’s the one-year anniversary of Tawnysha Greene’s novel, A House Made of Stars. The publisher (my wife and I) are celebrating by running an e-book sale: you can buy the kindle version for only $2.99 for a limited time. Wow!

I edited and published this novel, and I still feel struck by how good it is. The novel tells the story of a hard of hearing girl whose family wanders from crisis to crisis. As their situation worsens, it becomes clear that the source of their trouble is the protagonist’s unstable father, but no matter how dangerous he becomes, her mother insists that everyone has to do what he says, that the women of the family have a religious duty to support him, and cover up his violence.

The novel is “a gripping, gorgeous read,” according to celebrated author Moira Crone: it’s fast paced and lyrical and scary, and since being published has been a finalist in multiple novel competitions.

That was meant to be a page, quietly added to the blog’s navigation bar. After all, I reasoned, a fair number of people read this blog, and I am a PhD student nearing the end of his degree: I should reach out to the universe and see if anything comes back.

Instead, whether due to too much coffee on my part or a technical lapse of some kind, the piece went up as a post. I deleted it and tried again, and it went up a second time as a post. This means that thousands of people received the notification, twice. Sigh.

With luck, the third posting will go right. Apologies for any confusion I caused 🙂

This passage is from Show Your Work!, by Austin Kleon. I find it both reassuring and scary.

I feel like most artists dream of the day when our work will simply affect people, glowing with undeniable meaning and force. I worry, though, that much of this dream comes from school lessons, where the great works of the past were presented to us as though their meaning and worth was always obvious to all. We tend to forget how much packaging and outside exposition comes with those great works: it’s often a shock to assign Hemingway’s more opaque short stories to students, for instance, and discover that most of the class doesn’t get the hidden message that everyone who has studied the stories has dutifully learned. So it’s appealing to leave that dream behind. I don’t need to be Hemingway.

However, it’s also a scary thought. If readers didn’t get my story, then maybe Kleon is saying that’s my fault. If they didn’t buy my novel, maybe they would have if it had been presented to them differently. I can’t blame people for not seeking me out and discovering me.

If you truly believed what Kleon says here, what would you do differently? What would you change about your work?

I liked this post a lot — he breaks down the typical X Files episodes into acts, describing the events that almost certainly will happen each time. I had waves of happy nostalgia as I read through. However, the later comments left me hanging (a bit). I agree that “If the leads aren’t compelling we won’t mind if the monsters feed on them.” But how to create such characters? That seems to be the rub, and I’m not sure that merely supplying character details (religion, views on stem cell research) is the answer. Maybe there is a version of the act based progression, but for character rather than plot, something that also develops over the course of each episode…
(via Burlesque Press)

Eva was kind enough to interview me about Siren Song, Tawni Waters, and book publishing. She also raises important questions about the size of my head (which has never been successfully measured by science). Take a look!